Introduction
Church History in Plain Language was mentioned to me as a good resource to acquire a general feel for church history. It is written for laypeople who have little knowledge of the subject. Yet the work, however well-intentioned, has serious flaws.
The author, Bruce Shelly, does correctly diagnose, ‘Many Christians today suffer from historical amnesia,’ (p. xv) and uses a clever illustration drawn from Peanuts where Sally Brown introduces the subject of church history with this line, ‘When writing about church history we have to go back begin at the very beginning. Our Pastor was born in 1930’ (September 04, 1975). I applaud his desire to bring church history to laypeople. He writes with an engaging and concise style. However his work has many deficiencies and omissions.
Style & Formatting
On the whole, the work is not theological. While he does explain the controversies of the early church and the Reformation, he is less clear about liberal theology and mentions practically nothing about Pentecostalism or liberation theology, and nothing at all is said of neoörthodox theology (although Karl Barth is mentioned in connexion to his resistance to the Nazis). Some of this is a style choice, but it seems that he could have elucidated more theological facets of church history. In discussing the Trinity he is unclear about how the doctrine of the Trinity was formulated and some of his statements can be interpreted as modalism.
This book contains no central bibliography. This is unconscionable. Writing a work of an introductory nature and not including a bibliography at the end is like saying, ‘I will not present this information to you in an interesting enough way that you’d want to read more about it.’ Now to be fair, he does have a bibliography at the end of each chapter, but its only 5–6 works per chapter and there is a fair amount of overlap between the chapters.
Shelly also has an idiosyncratic arraignment of indices. He has three, one for people, one for events, and one for movements. The division between movements and events is particularly arbitrary. E.g., fundamentalism appears in the movements index, but the events index has an entry for the modern-fundamentalist controversy. Anything that does not fit with these categories is not indexed, and a great deal of the entries in the index do not list all the relevant pages. I wish publishers would include a digital copy with the book if only for the ability to electronically search.
Furthermore, the book is poorly referenced; there are no footnotes or numbered endnotes. At the back, a section labelled ‘Notes’ references certain quotes and recounted stories, but do not refer to the page in the text. Most grievous is that not all quotes are referenced. In his chapter on Calvin ‘Thrust into the Game’ he quotes Calvin, ‘...[God] has thrust me into the limelight and made me “get into the game” as they say.’ (p 257) Shelly provides no reference. I find it remarkable that the sixteenth-century Calvin uses in one sentence two now-banal phrases referencing objects of the nineteenth century; I guess they were not at all banal when Calvin wrote. Reader, I do not need to tell you that Shelly named his chapter after the phrase (and made much ado about it in the conclusion of the chapter) bespeaks volumes.
Content
A while ago I reviewed Fischer’s Historians’ Fallacies. Using Fischer’s categories, Shelly is prone to presentism by focusing on historical trends that directly influenced the present, the didactic fallacy by frequently drawing easy conclusion and morals from each period of history, and periodization by dividing history into neat periods. (He does write in his introduction, “Great eras, I know, do not suddenly appear like some unknown comet from the skies. In each age we find residue of the past and germs of the future,” [p. xvi] but then proceeds not to illustrate this throughout his work.)
In writing a history (particularly a one-volume history) one must omit people and events, not least because one hasn’t space for the entire period in a set number of volumes. The Apostle John realized this when he wrote, ‘Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.’ (John 21.25) But there is a quantitative difference between omitting a relatively minor figure like John Œcolampad and a more influential figure like Aimee Semple McPherson (both omitted from this work). A partial list of people who I believe ought to have been included but were not include Abraham Kuyper, Herman Bavinck, B. B. Warfield, Bonadventure, à Kempis, etc. Several others have only a few lines mentioning them: James Arminius has one line about him filtered through the era of the Wesley brothers. ‘The name [Arminianism] came from Jacob Arminius (1560–1609), a Dutch professor who tried to modify the Calvinism of his time. [John] Wesley felt no special debt to Arminius, but he did staunchly oppose Calvin’s doctrine of predestination.’ (p 338) How’s that again‽ Another example is Charles Finney, who is only mentioned for his antislavery stance. Concerning his omission of movements, the Dutch Futher Reformation (Nadere Reformatie) is missing; well, almost all the history of Christianity in the Netherlands is absent. Bruce Shelly focuses on Africa a bit until Augustine and then very little is said of the continent except for a few lines about Francis Xavier. He then skips from that to modern times. The book is very Anglo-American centric with a lengthy section on Cardinal Newman (from which I learnt a lot) and references to J. R. R. Tolkien.
The authors treatment of India is confusing at best. He mentions the Apostle Thomas may have made it to India in the first century, but when discussing the Nestorians suggests they established the a church in India. He does mention the Eutychians established an additional Indian church. However when he recounts Francis Xavier’s story, he intimates that he was the first to preach Christianity to India. Later when he’s discussing the twentieth or twenty-first century (not in the index and I was unable to find the page) he mentions Mar Thoma Christians but gives no context of their origins.
Conclusion
Although the book reads like a novel and is easily accessible, I cannot recommend it. It is unbalanced in focus and poorly referenced making it unpractical as a research tool for students of history, even those in a general audience.
